The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

This SEM shows a strain of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria taken from a vancomycin intermediate resistant culture (VISA). Under SEM, one can not tell the difference between bacteria that are susceptible or multidrug resistant, but with TEM, at least with VISA isolates one can see a thickening in the cell wall that may attribute to their reduced susceptibility to vancomycin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Obama Administration has unveiled its National Bioeconomy Blueprint, which places last week's EarthDay into startling perspective by coining an initiative that is largely predicated upon hope and the unknown.

Unknown, because our species - though composed primarily of micro-organisms - understands very little when it comes to the eco-dynamics and ecological landscapes of microbial organisms, their civilization(s), their symbiotic importance to our own lives and that of every other living vertebrate and invertebrate.

Cites Carl Zimmer, a brilliant student (and author) of all things microbial, "There's this whole ecosystem of interactions going on inside our own bodies that we do not understand — barely at all," he says. "Scientists are just starting to figure it out with very big projects where they're sequencing all the genes these microbes have. But they're just at the beginning of understanding it."

If you have the slightest doubt as to the importance of a bioeconomy, just think of living cells, bacteria and viruses, as dollar signs - an ethically imperialist but far from bankrupt notion that is precisely what biotech firms are engaging. They are considering with some zeal the numbers involved, however vaguely and imperfectly grasped; a seemingly infinite sea of life forms about which we know very little. Aside from some usual bacterial and viral suspects studied by scientists, humanity is all but uninvolved in the vast quanta of life of which, ironically, it is comprised; namely, as many as 180 trillion beings at any given moment in each human body, accounting for 44 different bacterial species on a single human forearm; 600 species of bacteria in the mouth, more still in a human colon; ten trillion cells (others suggest 100 trillion) per person, whether Democrat or Republican; seven million follicle mites in our eyelashes, dominated by two Demodex species, the smallest known arthropods – invertebrates with jointed limbs and segmented bodies which include among their rank, crustaceans, insects, spiders and centipedes.

A team of scientists at the University of Georgia led by microbiologist William Whitman estimated in 1998 that the total number of bacteria in the world number “five million trillion trillion, (a five with 30 zeroes after it.”) This was the first ever estimate of the total bacteria on earth. But it is just an estimate.

If bacteria like the extraordinarily symbiotic, helpful, even loving E. coli, in the lower intestines of most mammals (the life-form most intensively persecuted for purposes of research), are multitudinous, and critical to our survival, the viral universe is even more numerically outrageous. Viruses outnumber bacteria, with some “10 million virus particles” in every drop of seawater, “100 million” per “pinch of soil” and a world total of something like “1 with 31 zeroes behind it.”

Hence, the largely unheralded revolution the new Obama Administration National Bioeconomy Blueprint represents.

What will be particularly critical is not just the expediting of marketable products that can help in efforts to increase human health and happiness and a sustainable future on Earth, but a greater appreciation for that which is unseen and unknown in nature. All of the mysteries need not be solved, denuded, exploited. Bioeconomics is more theory than reality, aside from the millions of tormented vertebrates, mostly mammals and avians, who are tested needlessly, in my opinion, in most biomedical settings.

Where a bioeconomic blueprint has the hope of real traction is in the realm of non-invasive medicinal and agricultural derivatives that might just represent a turning point for indigenous communities dependent upon nature's cornucopia, whether in coastal, desert, neo-tropical or boreal biomes, among many others, that will prove what ecologists have been saying for millennia, in one form or another; namely, that a living creature is certainly worth much more alive, than dead.